AMD released the Athlon XP 3200+ for desktops, the last scheduled member of a chip family that helped turn the company’s fortunes around. Benchmarks here (“it should have been called a 2800+”).
Athlon: The Beginning of the End
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Toms says it like it is. AMD frontside bus sucks and slows it down. The opengl and direct x benchmarks have the 3200 about at fast as a intel 2.8 ghz .
This type of negative attention will hurt this chip.
Tom is an intel fanboy, he loves to trash AMD. Tell me, exactly how does the fsb suck and slow the chip down? The only thing I agree with him about is that the PR ratings suck. I wish they’d just get rid of them.
>Tom is an intel fanboy, he loves to trash AMD
Tom had some good benchmarks there. Benchmarks showed the real performance of this CPU, didn’t need Tom to trash anyone. The benchmarks spoke for themselves.
I remember when everyone used to call Tom an AMD fanboy, now people are calling him an Intel fanboy. Currently Intel is ahead of AMD, they simply offer a better product. The entire PR rating thing is misleading, Opteron was paper launched over a year ago and by the time it’s available in retail stores it won’t even be a big deal. Right now Intel’s roadmap looks more promissing than AMD’s.
So a desktop Athlon 64 is coming in September … does this thing work with WinXP ?
I thought that was what all the huzzah was about earlier this month? (could of been April) about Microsoft saying they were releasing a 64bit XP.
I may of course be completely mistaken (could only be Opteron) and as your a more regular visitor to the site you’d probably know.
From what I understadn the new chips are 32 bit compatable. So you should be able to run XP with proper drivers right??
I realize there are people who do care about benchmarks, but for most folks, price is much more important that benchmarks. The truth is that most people who sit down in front of an AMD +2700 and a P4 2.7 would not be able to tell the difference between the two. What they will notice is that the AMD machine will cost at least $50.00 less (usually more than that). Given the fact that the performance difference between the two is impercievable, the price will most of the time be the deciding factor.
I’ve used AMD for many years simply because the performance is comparable and the price is much better. That, more than anything, is why AMD has done so well, in my opinion.
AMD may not be the speed King, but most people can’t afford to purchase Intel’s fastest processors (and mobo, ram, and every other thing that makes Intel machines more expensive), every upgrade cycle.
People love to trash a successful product. How is AMD cheaper when they announced price of 3200+/200×2 to be $464 and P4 3,000/800 is $417. Memory, MB prices are on the same level. Intel was smart to go away from RAMBUS. AMD better start popping 64 bit processors very, very soon or go under – simple as that.
Iconoclast hit it on the head. AMD offers an extrememly good chip for a reasonable price and regular users couldn’t tell the difference if it were tatooed on their forehead while standing in a room full of mirrors.
If you buy one (or more) technology cycle(s) behind you will always get the best value for your dollar and *you* will always think it is great because it is faster than what you had before.
Moore’s law is like a train than travels in a circle, if you miss it once don’t worry because it will be around again real soon.
Who on here is going to rush out and buy the 3200+?
Of course its going to cost more than the competitive Intel part until AMD release their Athlon64 parts and pushes the prices of even the P4s down to nothing.
AMD is just milking the market, like Intel, for all they can get. They know they can’t get margins like they used to. There’s just too much competition in the processor market today.
But I hate the PR rating. I feel like I’m not getting what I paid for. But at least their performance is on par.
Prior to the actual launch of the processor, we at THG received a benchmark guide for our test sample that explains to the press the best environment for testing the CPU. Among other things, it contains recommendations for many benchmarks and BIOS settings. It also advises testers to exchange a DLL before starting Sysmark 2002 in order to attain better results in the Media Encoder. We, however, did not make any changes to the benchmarks and stuck to accepted standards.
And one other thing: before installing the operating system, AMD recommends deactivating the APIC mode (Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller) in BIOS in order to boost performance. How does that work? When APIC is deactivated, you only have 15 available IRQs, instead of the standard 23. This puts the brakes on the system, making it go down to the level of Windows 98 and causing hardware conflicts under Windows 2000/ XP.
I’m curious. Why did they not perform a comparison test to see if there was any difference between Tom’s “accepted industry standards” and the configuration AMD recommended the chip be tested in? In my experience I’ve never had any problems disabling ACPI under Windows 2000/XP. It has never made any significant difference for me.
In any case I don’t agree with the methodology of this test and think the results belong in the trash until a more objective benchmark is done. The video encoding performance of the chip should tell you that its on par with the P4 3.x.
Plus I don’t like how they claim the P4’s FSB is 2×200 Mhz in their benchmarks. Its not.
I don’t think its faster than a 3.x P4 with an 800Mhz FSB but I do think its faster than the older 3.x P4 with the 533Mhz FSB.
Its certainly not as slow as a 2.8 Ghz P4. But if you truely believe that then please go buy the P4, right now. What are you waiting for?
Is it worth it? I’m sure it will be as expensive as the 3200+ at least, is a 64 bit AMD worth it and at how many MGZ?
The chip that saved the company and actually gave end users a very powerful alternative to Chipzilla! No mean feat when you consider the size and power of Intel compared to that of AMD.
Rock on AMD64….I’m already warming up a spot for you….and long live choice, in every market!
When the first Athlon came out, all the hardware website would say where the technology came from for the EV6 BUS (FSB), and how it could scale up to 800Mhz.
Hardware websites no longer talk about this.
My next rig will definately be an Athlon 64..
Running Gentoo..
*sigh* ahhh,, bliss…
I do. If they market it as a 3200+ processor and charge it as if it were a 3200+ processor, it had better perform like a 3200+ processor.
No one is saying that the Athlon XP 3200+ is a bad chip. The only problem is that AMD has chosen an overly aggresive PR rating for this chip, and I agree with Tom that it should be a 2800+ instead of 3200+.
Well just do not buy. They will soon realise that they must drop the price. Then we will all be happy
If AMD goes under. It will be bad for all customers because Intel will be able raise the price as high as it wants. So AMD must stay.
AMD 3200+ isn’t always as fast as a Pentium4 3 GHz. But this rating isn’t a comparision to the Pentium but to a Duron. You shouldn’t just compare ratings but benchmark results.